Calling all Confluence space admins, I would love your input!

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

Is anyone here well-versed in managing spaces regularly? I have a few questions for you:

1. What are your biggest challenges when managing Confluence spaces?
2. What features would you like to see in a space management tool to make your life easier?
3. How do you collaborate with other teams when managing shared spaces? What challenges do you face?

I'm eager to hear your thoughts!

[Shelley Duncan]

Hi, 

I'm a space admin across almost every space in our instance.

1. Challenges - hard to see who has access where without going into each individual space. Hard to make updates without going into each individual space

2. Features - previously there was a menu option where you could see who had access. That's been removed. The workaround I use is to fake restrict a page to check access. It would be good to have that menu option back on the page without having to go into Space Settings

3. We have some spaces which are restricted. You can add links in Space 1 to Space 2, but there's no notifications or anything obvious to the editor if users in space 1 dont have access to Space 2. 

[Rita Nygren]

Agree with the Access challenge - my work around was to get Support to query this out for me (I supplied a SQL qry from my days of on-prem management).  they aren't fond of doing this but there is no work around to get access in aggregate.

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

@Shelley Duncan @Rita Nygren 

Thanks for sharing your experiences as a space admin! 

Managing access and making updates across multiple spaces sounds incredibly time-consuming. 

I'm particularly interested in your experiences with access management and the impact it has on your daily workflow. Understanding your specific use cases and their related pain points will help us explore how Space Manager for Confluence can potentially address these issues.

I'm eager to continue this conversation and explore potential solutions together. To follow up more effectively, would you be open to sharing the best way to reach you?

[Rita Nygren]

@Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)my biggest annoyance with access is getting all these emails RE "user is requesting access".  We have Jira, and these requests will be fullfilled via an approved service desk ticket, not because Atlassian shoved a "request access" button in front of someone who clicked a link from a different page.  The user doesn't know if they actually need access but they reflexively click to make the pop up go away.  I don't know if they are allowed access without research/approval.  All that process is doing is making work.

What I'd like to see instead is to give them a "do you want to make a jira ticket to request access" prompt, where they can say no, or upon yes it fills out the pertinent info (user, spacekey, link to page they want, if page is restricted, upon what parent page is the restriction set), leaves the user to fill out *why* and submit, and the space owner is automatically tagged for approving.  That would fit in with an enterprise process.

[Steve Rhodes]

Hi Darshanaa,

I would say:

1. Restrictions: Untangling the page restrictions in a space. You can't just search for pages in the restricted section, nor can you order by creator or created date. Its a mess, and even worse if you are on Confluence Standard because accessing a page and lifting restrictions is a crippled feature.

2. Space Permissions: Can’t see email address of user in space permissions. Detection of unmanaged users invited into the space means going to the admin console to search for the name. In Jira project People section this is visible. Also cannot see if a page is restricted until you click on it. Github links will have a RESTRICTED CONTENT label and thats external!

3. The challenge is that you need a good space admin on each side. Too often, everyone gets space admin rights and then rights get added, pages get deleted, restricted and you have no idea if people have exported the space.

Spaces: Need to be able to see which spaces a user has access to. Similar to the Jira feature "View Project Roles for User” CONFCLOUD-42853

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

@Steve Rhodes 

Thanks a lot for your valuable insight and pointing me to the Confcloud issue.

I completely agree that features like better search capabilities for restricted pages, clearer user information in space permissions, and improved control over space access would be incredibly helpful.

We're actively exploring ways to enhance Space Manager for Confluence to address these issues.

To better understand your specific needs, I would love to learn more about your workflow and any potential solutions you've considered. Would you be open to a brief conversation or sharing your contact information for follow-up?

[Konstantin Kleinikov]

Hi,

as a space admin I frequently need an option to manage page watchers for the bulk of nested pages. 

In our company we are addicted to having as few confluence spaces as possible, allowing different teams to communicate and update their own content within a space.

So, in addition to being able to manage watchers for specific pages and the whole space, it would be helpful to be able to manage them for a selected page and all nested sub-pages.

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

@Hi @Konstantin Kleinikov

Thanks for your input and I find your use case to be pretty interesting.

How often do you need to modify watcher lists for nested pages? Are there particular scenarios where this becomes especially time-consuming or complex?

Best,
Darshanaa

[Konstantin Kleinikov]

Hi @Darshanaa (ServiceRocket) 

we have multiple sub-areas (domains) within a space that are used by different teams. Each time a new employee joins a team I have to assign them for watching the nested pages of the team. Some employees need to watch a nested pages of several subareas: 

[Paul Burville]

Having a more structured approach to managing access and security,

It would be nice to have user groups with permissions set at group level that can then be added to a space. Ideally a spaces browser list would be handy in the admin section similar to users and groups.

Security and access management should be available on all paid platforms not just the premium version as security should not compromised based on a subscription price.

Having the use of visitor permissions that can be applied to groups would help with collab work as guest users could be invited but placed in a permission set group and allowed to access dedicated spaces or parts of spaces and then access can be easily managed.

Adding guests to a group that has permissions set at group level make life easy as the same group could be used within any space, for example if using spaces for projects a customer or maybe an auditor external to the business could be granted temporary access to a page within a space for progress or maybe signoff, this group could be used in multiple spaces and then those guests removed from the group when no longer required (the group could still be used again if needed)

The ability to be able to manage "app usage" on a page, (ideally by group) 

It would be nice to be able have users who might need access to the 3rd party apps like scroll exporter to only be able to use that feature where allowed, The ability to be able to block the use of an app on a space based on a user group or just a space permission would be ideal as user can be set to read only but still can use an app to print or export.

Most of the issues are related to locking down or seeing who has access to what, I appreciate that the premium version maybe have more insight, but being able to use a more Active Directory style approach would help where there was an ability to create permission sets for spaces that could be applied to a groups and those groups could be applied to a space or multiple.  

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

Hey @Paul Burville,

Thank you for this insight. The idea of a spaces browser list sounds particularly helpful for managing multiple spaces efficiently.

I would love to delve deeper on this and understand more about the specific pain points you encounter when managing access for different user groups, especially regarding external collaborators and temporary access needs.

Would you be available for a quick discussion on this?

[Lynne Wilton]

• Allowing a super user to be a space admin (for troubleshooting) without having permission to view all content.
  • At the moment this can only be done by setting restrictions at page level.
  • If a space has been restricted, the space is only found by looking through Confluence Admin > Security > Space permissions.
• More links/info in the Space permissions page to communicate what the various selection options are. Especially the Space Admin & Export options.
• An option to view the members of a group when adding group space or page access. My users are wary of applying groups if they do not know who is in them.

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

Hi @Lynne Wilton

Thank you for sharing. 

Your challenges definitely seem to align with what we've heard from other users, and we're actively exploring ways to enhance these areas in Space Manager for Confluence. 

I'm particularly interested in learning more about how the current limitations impact your day-to-day workflows. Would you be open to connect and discuss further about your use case? 

[Gerben Heinen]

• Definitely space permissions: it is horrible to set it up. I bought an app 'Permission management for Cloud' for confluence which helped me greatly to easier see what groups have access to what spaces. But in my opinion this should be part of Confluence natively, and also in Standard.
  Look at the permission schemes in JIRA, they work well.
• Creating and maintaining templates is difficult, you need to create a page to see what it looks
• Creating a template for an entire space or a blueprint is very complex. We end up copying a standard space which is setup with our pages, but then we have to reorganize it after copy.

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

Hi @Gerben Heinen

Thank you for sharing. What do you like most about the 'Permission management for Cloud' app? Does it also solve all your use cases in regards to providing space permissions? 

[Greg]

When a user accesses a space that is restricted at that level it would be REALLY helpful if the page gave them a list of users responsible for that particular space so they can contact them, instead of having to contact ME the site admin:)

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

Hi @Greg

Thanks for sharing.

How do you currently deal with this? Is there an alternative solution? 

[Tom_Carrott_Adaptavist]

Great article - very interesting! 

Restrictions are certain a big pain point in Confluence and something which is challenging to manage at scale. Native Confluence features have certainly improved lately but there are still pitfalls unfortunately. 

@Shelley Duncan @Steve Rhodes - your replies are particularly interesting to me! 

At Kolekti we're really interested in discussion pains/issues like this with users as its closely linked with a new application we're developing at the moment (more details here, if your interested)

I would love to connect with you further and discuss. If thats of interest please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn :) 

[Ralf Becker]

Rights management - much more granular like in JIRA

We operate our Atlassian instance as collboration tool for multiple clients, each having a Confluence space and a Jira Project.

1. It's very useful to mark people on pages to have them emaild and informed.
   BUT: You see all platform users in the dropdown, not just those having access.

2. Same for user directory: we have hidden the menue item, however, if you know the link you can access the dierectory. It is NOT useful, that our clients see who ele is on the platform and whats their email.

Rest has already been said in other threads here... 

[Rita Nygren]

I'm in the middle of a migration right now, and what would be handy would be the ability to query things about any given space, like

• Pages that use a specific add on
• information on Whiteboards, and now Databases (Apparently whiteboards don't export?  What happens when I try to export a space that has them?  Do I need to delete them first?  Can I find them and their owners?)
• the ability to export a list of all admins of a space (so that I can email them)
• Some better way to manage page restrictions (I just had to move a space between instances with 4000 restrictions - which means I had to delete 4000 records one at a time).  Users forget what they did, admins have to fix it.

[Tom_Carrott_Adaptavist]

Interesting use cases @Rita Nygren 

My previous response above might give some context to my interest in this area. I would love to hear more about your experience managing Confluence spaces – perhaps we can connect to chat further? 

Many thanks,
Tom